5 Tips to Shred Better With GarageBand for iPad

Make better music with GarageBand for iPad thanks to some options you never knew existed.

If you’re a musician, you need GarageBand for iPad. But--unlike iMovie--GarageBand is a very advanced tool, capable of making everything from exquisite music to obnoxious noise. Whether you’re Mozart incarnate or musically impaired, our expert advice will help you make GarageBand for iPad your favorite instrument.

A Greater Arpeggiator

If you don’t know an arpeggiator from a didgeridoo, the good news is you don’t have to. GarageBand allows for a simple way to play notes in your scale. In Keyboard mode, select the Scale button on the right. Choose a scale (if you don’t know anything about music, choose Major for a happy sound and Minor for a sad sound. Then choose the Arpeggiator button on its right. Slide the Run button to On and adjust the Note Order, Note Rate and Octave Range. With the scale selected, the Arpeggiator will still only play chords in your scale, making the entire process easier!

Choosing the right scale won’t make it impossible to hit a wrong note, but it will make it more likely you hit the right ones.

Are Four Strings Better Than None?

We love the smart instruments in GarageBand, with one exception—Smart Bass. Its groovy riffs might be good for some music, but they tend to muck up others. If you aren’t having any luck with GarageBand’s Smart Bass, try using a synth instead. With its heap of potential bass sounds (and the ability to lower the octave), you can ditch the four-string altogether. Just go to Instruments > Keyboards > Synth Bass and set the octave (on the far left) to somewhere around -2. We especially liked the sound of the Hip Hop Sub Bass synth.

If you need a wide range of notes, you can stack your keyboards by tapping the keyboard icon on the far right and selecting the icon with two keyboards.

Get Smart Drums All Squared Away

Though it might seem like a no-brainer, it’s easy to overlook the fact that you can stack each rhythm element on the same square in Smart Drums. If you’re trying to create the perfect beat, you’ll inevitably need a few things to be the same volume (X axis) and complexity (Y axis). But be careful—stacking too many elements at the same volume will lead to a muddy, indistinguishable percussion.

Of all the Smart Drums, the House Drum Machine has the most rhythm elements. And yep—you can stack all ten in the same square.

Palm-Mute Your Power Chords

In Smart Guitar, you can palm-mute by holding down any part of the neck on the far left or far right, outside of the note panels. This only works when the Chords switch is flipped, but you can still hit individual notes by tapping the strings within each chord.

Electric guitars won’t sustain their notes as long when palm-muted.

Export to .band

Once you’ve created your masterpiece, you can export to GarageBand for Mac for some fine-tuning. Tap My Songs and click the export button on the bottom right of the project you’re exporting. Tap “Send to iTunes,” and you’ll be presented with two export options—an AAC copy and a GarageBand copy. Choose GarageBand, and next time you plug in your iPad into your Mac, your .band file will be waiting for you in File Sharing inside iTunes.